You are here

In The News

“Congress has outsourced federal gun policy to the NRA. The only way to disrupt what has become ritual slaughter is with gun controls based on public health and safety, not on the business interests of a single industry. There is a reason why the United States is the only country where these atrocities happen regularly.

Three of New York City's five district attorneys joined calls Wednesday for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to stop arresting immigrants at local courthouses, arguing the practice threatens the city's justice system.

Of all the political and cultural issues that divide red states from blue ones, none is more volatile than guns and who can carry them.

Conservative rural states like Arizona and West Virginia allow almost anyone to carry a loaded firearm in public, while in urban states and big cities, it can be a felony.

But a piece of legislation quietly churning its way through Congress may change all that by making gun permits more like driver's licenses, transportable across state lines. If you are allowed to carry a concealed weapon in your home state, you would be allowed to carry it in all of them.

Fare beaters who hopped over grimy subway turnstiles back in the early 1990s were the first targets of a policing strategy that went after the smallest offenses and was credited with helping to drive crime down to record lows.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said his policy, which took effect Feb. 1, doesn’t prevent officers from stopping turnstile jumpers, and that those found to have weapons or an open warrant will be arrested and prosecuted. But a review by his office found that two-thirds of all those arrested in Manhattan for the crime had no prior convictions, and a judge posed no criminal sanctions on those who pleaded guilty, Vance said.

The depraved preppy trust-funder charged with raping and sexually assaulting two unconscious women, while filming it and saving the recordings on his computer in files marked “unconscious” and “rape,” took a 10-year plea deal today in Manhattan Supreme Court.

Cameron McDermott, 32, of Hempstead, LI, faced up to 25 years in prison for multiple rapes and sexual assaults on two women in Manhattan apartments he occupied in 2010 and 2013.

The subway turnstile — low enough to vault, ubiquitous enough to figure in the lives of millions of New Yorkers each day — has long served as a kind of dragnet for the Police Department. There, officers lie in wait, nabbing those who skip the fare.

Of late, these rotating entry points and those who jump them have become stumbling blocks for Mayor Bill de Blasio, who despite his liberal credentials, has been vocally opposed to the Manhattan district attorney’s office's new policy of declining to prosecute most who are arrested over fare evasion.

Lawmakers at a Tuesday hearing discussed ways to crack down on human traffickers who are using new financial tools to avoid detection.

New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said his office has expanded where it searches for trafficking activity, both on the internet and the deep web, where cryptocurrency transactions are increasingly prevalent.

The district attorney said that trafficking sites on the deep web have seen their profits skyrocket thanks to the “drastic increase in the value of digital currencies such as bitcoin” in recent months.

More than a dozen inspectors in New York City are charged with either not doing an inspection, or lying about what they found. What is worse is that prosecutors say the investigators may have put the health of workers at risk at thousands of construction sites in New York City.

The inspectors are all charged with failing to inspect hundreds of construction sites, then falsely certifying them as safe or misrepresenting lab results to conceal asbestos findings.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. today announced a new effort to engage survivors of work-related sexual violence, encourage reporting of these incidents, and deploy specially-trained sex crimes prosecutors to swiftly investigate such reports. Staffed by 15 Assistant District Attorneys and a social worker, the Work-Related Sexual Violence Team will be led by Assistant D.A. Vanessa Puzio, a supervising attorney with more than 12 years of experience in the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault.